The case history in the colonies

It is now a commonplace that European colonial states ruled as much through the knowledge they produced as through overt forms of coercion. In the vast literature articulating this point, however, some kinds of knowledge have counted more than others. Bernard Cohn, in his celebrated catalogue of the ‘investigative modalities’ of colonial knowledge, identified a wide array of epistemological genres, including travel narratives, maps and surveys, quantification, and antiquarianism (Cohn, 1996). Overwhelmingly, Cohn argued, British colonialists knew the people they ruled through abstraction and aggregation, prioritizing the definition of populations over the study of individuals. This theme has shaped much of the literature on colonial knowledge. The categories of ethnic difference inscribed by censuses and other instruments of classification—chiefly ‘race’, ‘caste’, and ‘tribe’—remain the classic examples of collective identities forged by the state (Anderson, 2006; Dirks, 2001; Mamdani, 1996, 2012; Metcalf, 1995; Vail, 1989). Histories of evolutionary thought emphasize that assumptions about the simplicity, conformity, and custom-boundedness of ‘primitive’ society left little room for individual subjectivities (Collini, 1978; Kuper, 1988; Stocking, 1987). One of the most influential models for histories of colonial power argues that ‘seeing like a state’ meant overlooking individuals altogether, dissolving their varied needs and distinct perspectives into impersonal fantasies of social engineering (Scott, 1998). From the censuses and surveys of the 19th century to the ‘modernization’ projects of the 20th, the colonial state is often seen as a kind of technocratic machine, imposing neat categories and sharply drawn boundaries from Olympian heights (Bonneuil, 2000).

Comparatively neglected, from this perspective, is one particular form of knowledge: the case history. That is not to say, of course, that records concerning individual colonial subjects have been ignored by historians. Amid the ‘archival turn’ of recent years, in fact, the case files generated by the colonial state have attracted increasing attention. What remains striking in these accounts, however, is the relentless intrusion of collective, categorical thinking into the particularity of individual lives. When colonial bureaucrats pried into the intricacies of family relationships and emotional states, they often did so to enforce racial discipline—to tidy up the classifications that threatened to dissolve in the messiness of lived reality (Stoler, 2009). Marginal cases, singular cases, and boundary-blurring cases seized official attention less as useful sources of knowledge than as troubling aberrations to be policed and managed. From this perspective, even the most intimate and personal domains appeared incomprehensible until they could be situated in relation to ethnic categories. As one historian recently observed of the child welfare bureaucracy in early 20th-century Cape Town, ‘Where the case file failed was in its capacity to construct the individual as an individual, detached from its social context’ (Jackson, 2018).

What kind of case history is it that pays so little heed to the individual? John Forrester memorably argued that certain methods, such as psychoanalysis, privilege the individual case as the foundation of general knowledge. Yet he also made clear that the passage between the individual and the universal, the idiographic and the nomothetic, is fraught with tension. Pulling in one direction, the richly textured details of the particular—‘the divergences, the detours, the idiosyncrasies of the individual’s life’—threaten to undermine the task of generalization (Forrester, 2017: 11). This is the world of complex narratives made famous by Freud, Luria, and Sacks: literary forms that seem to open up possibilities beyond their diagnostic conclusions. A parallel might be drawn here between the case history and the photograph, both of which are framed by observers for particular ends but tend to capture details that exceed the observers’ purpose. In the case of the photograph, that extraneous richness is the product of mechanical technology: Any object reflecting light within range of the lens leaves a physical trace on film (Sontag, 2013: 635–6). For the case history, the ‘unmotivatedness’ of some details arises instead from the attempt to replicate, in narrative form, the subjective uncertainties of the diagnostician (Krämer, 2007: 16–17). Like any good detective story, the case history is littered with clues that may or may not prove significant in the end. There is, of course, a good deal of artifice in the selection and arrangement of these clues: What makes the genre so satisfying is precisely the climactic revelation that apparently trivial details are, in fact, meaningful (Ginzburg, 1980). But even details that lack diagnostic significance inevitably enter into the narrative. Genuine clues reside among red herrings; seemingly momentous facts that turn out to point in the wrong direction must be carefully considered before they can be explained away. In the psychological disciplines, especially, the potential significance of family, upbringing, sexual relationships, fantasies, and dreams—to name just a few possibilities—lends itself to narrative sprawl. Cases have a way of becoming flesh-and-blood characters.

Pulling in the other direction is the need to generalize: to derive universal principles from the observation of individuals. If the high literary art of a Freudian case history represents the individualist extreme, then the standardized format of the bureaucratic file represents its opposite number. At least two distinctive characteristics of bureaucracies have gravitated against rich, sprawling chronicles of individuality: first, an ever-present danger of information overload, and second, a preference for readily applicable rules. From this perspective, fine-grained particularity may be a source of knowledge, but it is also a problem. The classic bureaucratic solution has been to disaggregate individuals into bundles of traits, slot those traits into ready-made grids, and flatten life stories into data points. This, famously, is how Foucault saw the case: as the prose of governmentality rather than the poetry of selfhood (Foucault, 1994[1963], 1995[1975]). As bureaucracies accumulate files, patterns can be established, norms articulated, and aberrational cases flagged. Some traits or combinations of traits will acquire special meanings—casual, classificatory, and so on—by virtue of their recurrence in particular circumstances. Traits that lack such meanings, and that therefore cease to bear on bureaucratic operations, are recorded less frequently over time. In this way, individual stories get ‘smoothed out’ to maximize comparability, applicability, and generalizability (Ankeny, 2011: 269).

For Foucault, the individual whose details were registered in a clinical or administrative setting was already, always, a unit of comparison. ‘Individuality’ was thinkable only in relation to a certain vision of the collective; the latter determined what was worth recording about the former. From this perspective, nothing could be less surprising than the relentless instrumentalization of case histories in the colonies. While bureaucracies everywhere routinely smoothed out the particularity of life stories, the racial logic of colonial rule pushed this tendency to an extreme. Put another way, the uneasy balance lurking within every case history—between textured narrative on the one hand and impersonal standardization on the other—tipped decisively in the colonial context. If individual lives were not quite invisible to colonial rulers, they were forcefully, often crudely, pressed into the service of theories of racial difference and justifications for European control.

A central site for the production of case histories was, of course, the asylum. In the colonies, where expenditures on ‘welfare’ were always hard to justify, asylums developed as marginal institutions. They housed relatively few people and devoted scant resources to psychiatric care; their energies were focused on confining rather than curing (Ernst, 2010; McCulloch, 1995; Sadowsky, 1999). The distinctive hallmark of these institutions, however, was their thoroughgoing segregation. It was not just that European settlers, soldiers, and officials were kept in separate facilities from indigenous or ‘native’ subjects and treated with far greater deference. It was that different logics of aetiology and nosology applied depending on the race of the patient. A characteristic and telling example comes from the British colony of Nyasaland, where government medical officers distinguished between a ‘European type’ and a ‘Native type’ of schizophrenic delusion. When Africans suffered from the former—typically delusions of grandeur, revolving around the fantasied possession of wealth or power—a diagnosis of ‘deculturation’ almost invariably followed (Vaughan, 1991). This was a standard diagnosis across colonial Africa. Authorities tended to assume that the natural mental state of the African was childlike, happy-go-lucky, and blissfully free of neurosis (Vaughan, 2010). When Africans went mad, therefore, they often seemed to have shattered in response to the unaccustomed pressures of Western modernity: education, technology, bourgeois individualism. From this standpoint, the mission of psychiatry lay in a kind of inner repatriation, restoring African minds to the limited horizons of their own primitive culture.

Of course, such assumptions sat uneasily with the depth and complexity demanded by the classic Freudian case history. As a result, the life stories that did leave traces in the colonial archive were often distorted and foreshortened in accord with ideological imperatives. Take, for instance, the case of Isaac O., a Nigerian man repeatedly committed for ‘mania’ in the 1930s and 1940s, whose records were unearthed decades later by the historian Jonathan Sadowsky. Isaac’s file in the colonial archive contained information on his family background, traumatic experiences of violence, and inner states of fear and anxiety, as well as third-person observations of his affect and behaviour. The details that sealed his fate, however, were those that represented him not just as a troubled individual, but as a troubled—and troublesome—African, the embodiment of unsettling threats to the categories that underpinned colonial rule. In keeping with the ‘deculturation’ hypothesis, Isaac was an educated Christian who showed signs of backsliding into paganism. Judicial interrogators thus homed in on his fear of being poisoned by ‘juju’, attempting to pin down his worrisomely fluid position on the continuum between primitivism and modernity. Equally noteworthy to British authorities were the undercurrents of dissent and subversion that coursed through Isaac’s delusions: He predicted that ‘all the Europeans in Nigeria’ would soon be killed; he posed as a government messenger and then as a police officer; he claimed to own an expensive motor car, a rare symbol of colonial privilege (Sadowsky, 1999). The same symptoms that revealed one individual’s diagnostic fate also served as indices of social, cultural, and political stability.

Case histories are always political documents, never more so than when they are produced by the state to achieve particular ends (as, in Isaac’s case, to justify an act of confinement). It is striking, nonetheless, that studies of individual minds in the colonies so often wound up meditating on the stability of the colonial enterprise itself. When anthropologist Charles Gabriel Seligman began collecting dreams from across the British Empire in the 1920s, he discovered something unexpected: that the unconscious minds of colonial subjects were haunted by the spectre of oppressive British rulers. In Australia, aborigines literally dreamed of rebelling against the European missionaries who used their authority to suppress indigenous faith traditions. In the Naga Hills of northeastern India, a government clerk—seething with what Seligman called ‘father hostility’—appeared to fantasize about toppling the British district officer who employed him. In Uganda, a ‘native chief’ had repeated nightmares about British officials and missionaries inflicting brutal beatings on Africans for the most trivial infractions (Linstrum, 2016).

While he inevitably acknowledged the ‘very large part played by white officials’ in these dreams, Seligman had trouble drawing clear-cut lessons from the archive he created. After all, the rich inner lives contained within it gave rise to a multiplicity of possible meanings, from the universality of Freudian dynamics such as the Oedipus complex to the universality of symbolic codes on the model of Jung’s collective unconscious. But the colonial rulers who saw value in such psychoanalytic explorations confined themselves to asking a much narrower question: What did subjects of the British Empire think and feel about the British Empire? Prying into the inner world of dreams and fantasies seemed to offer a useful source of political intelligence, revealing undercurrents of discontent that remained unsayable—at least to the British—in most situations. Lacking access to the mechanisms that register public opinion in democratic societies, such as elections, protests, and press criticism, they could not resist seeking answers in the particularities of the case.

Officials and researchers consequently fanned out across the British Empire between the wars with the tools of Freudianism in hand. In Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), colonial education officer J. F. Ritchie coaxed a number of African students into psychoanalysis, then passed along his case notes to a colonial administrator. ‘The young men concerned’, Ritchie reported, ‘showed unmistakable signs that they were on the point of plunging into subversive activities’. In Nigeria, a Seligman protégé who trained at the Tavistock Clinic undertook a Leverhulme-funded study of the African women who rebelled against British rule in 1929. Arguing that the boom-and-bust cycles of the colonial economy and the repressive actions of the colonial military had unleashed pathological levels of resentment, Sylvia Leith-Ross warned that the threat of rebellion remained strong. In the Gold Coast (now Ghana), government anthropologist Margaret Field, another Seligman acolyte, warned that lack of cultural sensitivity among colonial administrators had given rise to a deracinated, disoriented, and emotionally unstable generation of Africans who were primed for a nationalist uprising. In another part of the Gold Coast, yet another Seligman-trained anthropologist picked up on powerful feelings of aggression against the British as he recorded the dreams and free associations of indigenous sub-rulers. The colonizer represented ‘a common enemy’ among Africans, Meyer Fortes observed, like ‘the Jew in Hitler’s Germany’ (Linstrum, 2016).

The common thread running through all the accounts was a twist on the Oedipal story. The tyrannical patriarch, a largely fantasied figure in the European context, was here embodied in the very real force of the ‘white man’ and the colonial state behind him. This was a strikingly deromanticized vision of empire, in which only habits of deference and fear of reprisal constrained the urge to throw off shackles. In contrast to the ideal European analysand, who feels liberated by the discovery that his anxiety is rooted in an imaginary projection of the father figure, Ritchie argued that ‘the African living under our system…finds himself up against a real situation which is pretty well as bad as the imaginary one’. Colonial subjects, in other words, experienced British rule as an oppressive force on par with the worst Freudian nightmares (Linstrum, 2016).

How far did this kind of psychoanalytic knowledge represent useful knowledge for colonial officials? A few researchers suggested ways of sanding down the edges of state authority in order to diminish the intensity of resistance. Beyond a certain point, however, imperialists simply could not and did not acknowledge the depth of the psychic wounds inflicted by empire. What they emphasized, instead, was the idea that opposition to empire arose from mental disorder—that it represented an emotive outburst, a frustrated lashing-out, rather than a rational political programme. Although this was an old idea in many ways, the advent of psychoanalysis strengthened its authority as a rhetorical tactic (Hartnack, 2001; Mahone, 2006). Even as therapeutic thinking helped to reveal otherwise invisible experiences of suffering, it also stigmatized and delegitimized anti-colonial movements. At a time when ‘self-determination’ had both psychological and political resonances, identifying neurosis as a driving force of these movements was to cast doubt on their readiness for independence (Sluga, 2006).

So far, so Foucauldian. The inner lives of colonial subjects—however complex, however ill-suited to stereotyping, however contrary to European preconceptions—were routinely trimmed and tailored to fit the imperatives of empire. It therefore comes as something of a surprise—and poses a complication for Foucault’s story—that even the constrained individuality of the case history ultimately proved too unruly for the taste of colonial rulers. Mental tests, questionnaires, and other methods that could be more readily instrumentalized gained favour over time, and were eventually employed on a wider scale than case histories ever were. This trend was not unique to the colonies; psychologists across the West searched for ways not merely to strip down the case history, but to translate its narrative nuances into images and numbers that could be grasped in an instant (Leys, 1991; see along Young, 2020, this issue). Yet the enthusiasm with which colonial officials embraced these alternative forms of psychological knowledge was striking nonetheless.

The Second World War marked a turning point for psychology in the British Empire because the induction of millions of colonial soldiers into the armed forces furnished an unprecedented opportunity for mental testing across racial and cultural lines. When another wave of unrest broke after 1945, the machinery of psychological surveillance that whirred into action was fuelled by tests and questionnaires rather than narratives. In Malaya, Communist rebels captured by British security forces had to respond to a battery devised by social scientists, touching on childhood experiences, family relationships, social connections, gambling habits, and feelings of shame and envy. In Jamaica, a study sponsored by the Colonial Office amassed data from children and adults across the island, including some life histories and home observations but drawing mostly on results of so-called projective tests (including the Rorschach inkblot test). In East Africa, Colonial Office researchers used questionnaires to trace the connections between educational background and support for nationalist movements. All of these studies, and others, attempted to trace the ferocity of anti-colonialism back to the discontents of modernization, giving new life to the ‘deculturation’ model in the process. If imperial psychology in the 1920s and 1930s revolved around the Oedipus complex, the key concept of the 1940s and 1950s was the frustration–aggression hypothesis, which reduced psychoanalytic dynamics to the predictable, almost physiological patterns of stimulus and response (Linstrum, 2016).

This postwar conjuncture had many sources. One was a shift in colonial policy from the traditionalism or primitivism of ‘indirect rule’ to the modernizing ethos of ‘development’: a change that favoured the ‘harder’, more quantitative sciences of sociology and especially economics at the expense of cultural anthropology (Foks, 2019; Steinmetz, 2017). Within the ‘psy’ fields, meanwhile, the hermeneutic techniques of classical psychoanalysis were losing ground to the norming and pathologizing outlook of medical psychiatry. All of these trends owed more than a little to the influence of the new ‘behavioural sciences’ in the United States: a project shaped, in part, by the work of human scientists in America’s new colonial territories in the Pacific. When subjects there proved too difficult or too complicated to generate usable data through tests and questionnaires, they were relegated to case histories instead: a convenient repository for the non-standardizable and therefore marginal material that did not conform to the requirements of the ‘total archive’ (Jardine and Drage, 2018; Lemov, 2018).

In their drive to harvest neat, ideologically reliable knowledge about the minds of colonial subjects, officials and researchers read case histories in selective ways, pared them down to simplistic fables, and ultimately bypassed them whenever they could. This underscores an important point: Although imperialists worked mightily to bend the case history to their purposes, they never fully succeeded. The authority granted to personal testimony in case histories, though in varying degrees and with varying intentions, always contained a ‘subversive’, ‘empathetic’, ‘empowering potential’ (Lang, Damousi, and Lewis, 2017). The voices of trauma, anxiety, and anger that surfaced in Seligman’s dream collection attest to that. So, of course, do the case histories embedded in the most famous anti-colonial text of all: Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon, 2004[1961]). Officials turned away from case histories because they did not always tell them what they wanted to hear. The politics of the colonial case history were, in other words, underdetermined, overflowing the categories and resisting the generalizations that colonial rulers sought to impose.

Consider the example of Fanon’s very approximate Anglophone analogue: Wulf Sachs, the leftist South African psychoanalyst whose book-length study of John Chavafambira was published first as Black Hamlet (Sachs, 1996[1937]) and then as Black Anger (Sachs, 1947). Like other Freudian researchers in the interwar empire, Sachs found evidence of simmering racial hostility held barely in check by internal compulsions as well as fear of the colonial state. Like them, too, Sachs was drawn to an Oedipal theory of African political psychology in which the affective patterns of childhood—dependency on mothers, hostility to fathers—served as an unconscious bulwark of British domination. Unlike most of his contemporaries, however, Sachs came to conceive of the case history as a venture in anti-colonial politics. When he concluded that ‘John was ready for revolt’, it was not a warning but a celebration (ibid.: 232). For Sachs, guiding a patient to overcome resistance in the psychoanalytic sense made resistance in a political sense possible. His text, and others like it, represent a counter-tradition to the instrumentalization of case histories by the colonial state.

The case in Forrester’s telling itself embodies a kind of counter-tradition. Amid the post-Darwinian, post-Galtonian fashion for population thinking and statistical abstraction, the case method insists on the significance of the individual as a source of universal knowledge. In law, ethics, medicine, and business, Forrester shows, general principles are routinely deduced and elucidated through the consideration of cases. And yet, in arguing for the epistemological respectability of the case history—for the value of knowledge production through narratives as well as numbers—Forrester perhaps understates its subversive, even anarchic, qualities. While cases can lead to generalizations, they also threaten to topple them. This was an acute concern for the keepers of the perpetually unstable colonial archive. Attempts to ‘unify the knowledge they were collecting’ often proved elusive: They ‘fell apart, ran in many different directions like the hedgehogs in Alice’s game of croquet’ (Richards, 1993: 4). Because the case history, too, had a way of running in many different directions, it was less a form of useful knowledge for colonial rulers than a source of inconvenient truths.